Project Gotham Racing 2 : Web Wombat : Games

Can driving be an art? Or better yet, can the manipulation of a motor vehicle round corners, over crests and down long straights be something that is more than simply competitive?

In the Xbox game Project Gotham Racing 2, yes. Most definitely.

"It's not how fast you drive, it's how you drive fast," is the game's slogan, and what a slogan it is - I love it!

And it goes a long way to explaining the premise of Project Gotham Racing 2, arguably the best driving game the Xbox has ever seen.

What started out as Metropolis Street Racer on the Dreamcast, an innovative, well thought-out game, considered too challenging by many, the sequel was one of the first games on the Xbox, and it wasn't too bad. But PGR2 is ducks nuts, one of those games that does lots of things right, and very few things wrong.

To start with, PGR2 is not like your average racing game, and while Gran Turismo is far from average, it makes for a good comparison. In Polyphony Digital's racer, most of your game time is spent driving around circuits, completing lap after lap in pursuit of victory, for the ultimate glory that placing first bestows.

For the uninitiated, PGR2 is much more specialised, and while there are many circuits where the aim is to beat seven other cars to the finish line, there are also other challenges to add variety. On top of the orthodox races, there are overtaking challenges, cone challenges and timed runs.

In any situation, as you race - or more aptly, drive - you will earn Kudos points for fancy, graceful and sometimes even slapdash manoeuvres. The control are responsive and easy to pickup, and counter-steering into powerslides or aggressive oversteers feels spot on.

Like a traditional racer, you are rewarded for placing well or winning a race, and also for breaking fastest lap records and so forth. But the fun really starts when you string together combos, which can be made up of power slides, overtakes, drafting (slipstreaming), getting air, driving up on two wheels and even doing 360s.

Here's an example. You're cruising down the streets of Moscow in your lurid yellow NSX Type-R and you've had a good run - no heavy impact on the walls of the track. After a while, the words 'Clean Section' will appear at the top right of the screen, along with a Kudos reward - let's say 25 points.

The US-built Saleen S7 bags 'em up in Sydney

If you can perform another Kudos-rewarding move within a few seconds of the first, you'll start a combo, and you get multipliers for these the more you string together.

So, after your clean section, let's say your hammering along at a good clip, 190km/h by now, and there's this killer crest looming.

Up she goes!

You're airborne for a few nanoseconds as the road drops away, sparks from under the car marking touch down (take that Honda!), and another reward - let's say 17 Kudos.

Keep this up and (in theory) you could string together one massive Kudos combo for an entire lap or more, with lots of slides, overtakes and clean sections.

So, where was I? Ah yes, Kudos. These Kudos points are needed to complete stages successfully - cone challenges in particular demand a specific score to pass, perhaps 2000 Kudos for a silver, for instance. You can also spend your hard-earned K to unlock new vehicles.

It's safe to say that the premise is fairly straightforward, and while it's been seen before in Bizarre's previous racers, it's never been done like this, with so much flair, attention to detail and responsiveness. The best racing/driving game on the 'Box? Hell yeah.

After watching the introduction scene, where a perfectly rendered 6.0-litre V12 Ferrari Enzo is viewed slowly and surreptitiously from every angle, you have to create a profile and, from here, you have a few options. Interestingly, if you are hooked up to Xbox Live, you'll also be automatically logged on - but more on that later.

The meat of the game - where you unlock new cars and tracks - lies in the Kudos World Series, and while Street Racing and Time Attack modes have merit, the biggest challenges lie in the World Series.

At first you'll only be able to race in the crappy class of cars, which includes such vehicles as the Mini Cooper S, Ford Focus RS and VW Golf R32. Anyone who's familiar with modern sportscars will probably slap themselves while exclaiming "But William, they're not crappy cars!?"

Agreed, not in the real world. But in PGR2, with more than 100 cars on offer, including TVRs, Ferraris, Porsches and Shelby Cobras, they're agile but painfully slow when compared to such cars found in the upper echelons.

Take-offs are always difficult to gain traction

So, upon entering the first race, you are then asked to choose a car. In general, only two or three cars are available at first, and the remainder (usually about seven or eight others) must be unlocked with Kudos, also the Gotham currency, which kind of means you get paid to powerslide I guess.

Anyway, once you've picked a car, you then choose a difficulty level, of which there are five. Each one corresponds to a medal.

The easiest level is the steel medal, followed sequentially by bronze, silver, gold and finally platinum. Once you beat the game with all steel medal, you'll unlock a special car, and so on with bronze, silver and the rest.

Beating races/challenges on platinum level rewards you with more kudos - ergo, more cars - but often the challenge is seemingly impossible. Until you download ghosts from players all over the world, that is. Players who have completed the challenge, allowing you to watch and perhaps even learn how they managed it.

Cheating? No. It's more of a community thing, and it's one of the very few innovative methods I've seen of incorporating an online aspect, console or not.

If you have a link to Xbox Live, the results of both your own efforts in races and those of all others connected are compared, so you can see where you stand in the grand scheme of things. Sometimes it can be rather demoralising to see that a Spanish kid has right-royally spanked your best times, but at the end of the day having access to such a huge and evolving community is very exciting.

Other's features that arrive with Xbox Live include head-to-head races, leaderboards, and the downloading of ghosts, which a good way to see how the best in the world approach various races and challenges, as mentioned above.

Beyond all the innovation that Bizarre Creations has brought to the table with Kudos rewards and the unbelievably cool online aspect, the fact of the matter is that without solid audio-visual and gameplay elements, the game would be a well thought-out but poorly executed title.

Thankfully, this is not the case, and PGR2 has one of the coolest physics engines this side of Grand Prix 4. Granted, it's not ultra-realistic, but for the most part the cars behave just as they would when put in similar situations in real life.

Another Ferrari, another city...

The cars feel good when cornered with 100% traction, and even manhandling them round corners with the tail out feels good. Burnouts and doughnuts are fairly realistic too, which is nice to see.

Rumble feedback from the controllers for almost everything that affects the cars results in a more engrossing play, and in general the game is an extremely enjoyable play.

Front wheel drive vehicles understeer predictably, rear wheelers oversteer and the AWDs veer slightly above and below a neutral equilibrium.

The cars themselves, of which most are highly desirable, behave surprisingly realistically even in tricky situations, such as over cornered crests and around off-camber corners.

Some handle like shit (often high powered pre-1990 models) and some stick to the road like proverbial glue. And there's a massive variety too. Big dumb 4WDs, like BMW's X5 and Porsche's Cayenne Turbo, tiny racers, like the Lotus Exige and Vauxhall VX220, classic rice-burners like Mitsubishi's Evo VII and the Toyota Supra, and who could forget the supercars? Ferrari's Enzo, Porsche's Carrera GT and Pagani's Zonda are but a few of the big guns.

While the game starts off fairly slowly with relatively meek vehicles, proceedings soon get quite technical, and though there's no Polyphony Digital-inspired vehicle upgrades, no choosing rim designs or adding body kits, the cars are different enough, and the tracks varied enough to provide what is perhaps better longterm value than the venerated Gran Turismo 3.

All the ingredients are there for a tip-top racer: Fast, exotic, expensive cars, which can driven along real stretches of road taken from places like Scotland, Australia, Hong Kong and America, and even smashed up and deformed if that's what revs your engine.

The track design is well above the norm, and Bizarre deserve a big pat on the back for metropolitan roads into kick-arse race tracks. Of course, one of the biggest drawcards for me personally was the inclusion of the Nürburgring, almost 22 kilometres of sweeping corners, long straights and a few hairpins. On this amazing circuit the Enzo easily eclipses 350km/h down the main straight.

Sound effects are average at best, but then when has a driving game ever got engine sound effects right? This is one area of such games that you'd think would be respected, but no. I purchased the Dodge Viper to see how the V10 engine sounds, and guess what? It sucked. Forget 8.3-litre V10, more like a 400cc inline triple. Urg.

I'll take the M3, but no way I'm
gonna been seen in the X5...

When it comes to Gotham's graphics however, the acoustic crimes can be almost forgotten, such is the clarity and attention to detail.

The cars are pixel perfect, with great attention to detail and with lovely bevelled edges in the bodywork.

They're accurately modelled right down to the brake callipers, and not one polygon is left untouched by the mesmerising lighting system either.

The play of shadows across cars as they move is quite striking and very lifelike, the chrome mapping also better than most.

Replays are a great way of checking out all the minutiae, as trying to do so whilst driving is haphazard at best.

But even in the event of a big smash, the cars react and look fairly realistic - glass smashes, number plates fall off, panels crumple, lights break and fail to work and sometimes it's even possible to dislodge exhaust piping, sparks erupting from the metal-on-bitumen as they drag behind.

Trackside detail is sumptuous, and the clipping range amazing. You'll see the Harbour Bridge looming from miles away as you speed through the streets of suburban Sydney, and the high rise towers in Hong Kong are an imposing sight to behold.

A clever mixture of bump-mapping and high quality texture maps give the different road surfaces an authentic, grainy look, particularly at speed, and when the morning sun shines on some surfaces the effect is breathtaking. Weather effects make an appearance, but apart from fog and sweet-looking rain, there's not much else to report.

For lovers of high performance cars, Gotham would make the ultimate encyclopaedia too, as you can take a walk, in first-person mode - no less, around show rooms with all the cars sitting pretty. It's quite an experience.

Project Gotham Racing 2 is an amazing package. It's got a shelf-life that defies most others, a pioneering online aspect that needs to be experienced to be believed, gameplay that just won't quit and graphics that will continue to inspire for many years to come.

There really isn't much that Gotham does wrong. Granted, some gamers may get tired of the Kudos World Series at times, (especially those without Xbox Live) whose reward of new cars and tracks can be a little slow, such is the number of tasks to complete, but all things considered, there's a lot to like here.

The definitive racer on the Xbox -- some say all consoles -- Project Gotham Racing 2 is a brilliant game and is guaranteed to reach cult status, inviting more gamers to try out the awesome Xbox Live features. Hopefully it's a sign of things to come.

See you online!

Game: Project Gotham Racing 2
System: Xbox
Players: 1-4
Online: Yes
Developer: Bizarre Creations
Distributor: Microsoft

Rating: 95%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)

Project Gotham Racing 2 is on the shelves now.

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